Free AutoCAD Tutorials and Articles

Monday, December 15, 2008

The 3ds Max & Viz (now called Max Design) tutorials section contains a range of tutorials from beginner to advanced. The tutorials are divided into categories and each category forms a self-contained module with sample data for you to download so that you can follow the tutorials. The following categories are available; The Basics, Working with Objects, Create a 3D Landscape, Materials & Production and Techniques. If you're looking for something specific, try the relevant category or take a look at the full listing on this page.

Monday, July 14, 2008

The command line can be very useful, especially for beginners because AutoCAD often gives useful promtpts which helps when learning how to use some of the more complicated commands. The command line is also used by AutoCAD to report information back to the user, but sometimes that information may run to several lines of text, and disappear from view. A good example of this is the Distance command (you can run this from the keyboard by typing DIST). The problem is that by default, the command line is only two lines high and so if you use the Distance command, you don't even see the distance reported to the command line.

One way round this problem is to increase the depth of the command line to show more lines but this takes up valuable drawing area. A better solution is to display the command window using the F2 key on the keyboard.

As you can see above, the command window also allows you to scroll back through the command line so that you can review your recent drawing history.